This not only affects employment conditions and workplace culture for half a million civil servants, but also their decision-making, which in turn shapes policies across the country. 

Six-figure compensation for civil-service whistleblower

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) have settled the employment-tribunal claim of whistleblowing civil servant Eleanor Frances, agreeing to pay her £116,749. As part of the settlement the departments have committed to return to impartiality and to develop a new policy in relation to the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. 

Eleanor Frances, an engineer and Grade 6 civil-service manager, raised formal concerns in 2022 about her department’s policy on transgender inclusion, but was knocked back and then treated unfairly. 

Despite the Forstater employment appeal tribunal judgment, Frances feared that expressing her belief that sex is biological, binary, immutable, and important could expose her to complaints or disciplinary action. 

She was particularly concerned about what her department’s policy said about single-sex toilets and changing facilities. Across the civil service, departmental HR policies allow people to use facilities intended for members of the opposite sex on the basis of their self-declared gender identity.

Frances was told that if she objected to showering, changing or using the toilet with a male colleague, she could use alternative unisex accessible facilities. The policy also suggested that if staff objected to the presence of a male person in female facilities they could be disciplined for failing to support the gender identity of their colleague.

After raising concerns about the lawfulness of this policy, Frances says she was subjected to a sustained pattern of unfair treatment. She was given baseless negative performance feedback and stripped of her team and responsibilities. She resigned in 2023 and brought claims for discrimination on the grounds of philosophical belief, sex and disability, along with victimisation, protected disclosure detriment and unfair constructive dismissal, represented by Peter Daly and Akua Reindorf KC.

DCMS and DSIT have now agreed to pay her £116,749 and the Permanent Secretaries, Susannah Storey CB (DCMS) and Sarah Munby (DSIT), have agreed to issue a statement saying that their departments are working together to introduce a new policy on trans staff and are committed to ensuring the civil service is impartial. 

Transgender policies in the civil service

What are the policies that Eleanor Frances was concerned about, that are now being revised?

In 2011 a:gender, an internal civil-service network which lobbies for staff who identify as trans or intersex, developed a document on how to treat trans-identifying employees. In May 2014 it was adopted and published on the gov.uk website.

It was updated in February 2016 and published with endorsements from the Civil Service Employee Policy Team and the Civil Service LGB&TI Champion, Sue Owen. Owen, who at the time was the Permanent Secretary for DCMS, called it “an excellent document for everyone in the business” and “comprehensive, authoritative and powerful”.

In 2015 the Government Equalities Office (GEO) published guidance on providing services to transgender customers (with external lobby group Gendered Intelligence) and on recruiting and retaining transgender staff (with Inclusive Employers).

The Civil Service/ a:gender document is extraordinary. It starts with alarming and unreferenced statements, for example: “In 1981, the Harry Benjamin Institute estimated that 50% of the transsexual population died by their own hands by the age of 30.” It cited trans lobby group Press for Change as the source for the claim that “34% of those needing to change gender attempted suicide at least once”.

It also declared that “medical treatment to enable transsexual people to alter their bodies to match their core identity has been highly effective with around a 98% success rate”.

It came up with a spurious estimate that there could be between 7,800 and 17,880 “intersex” civil servants, based on a debunked claim that 1.7–4% of the world’s population is intersex. It embraced a wide range of novel gender identities, including gender-neutral, non-gender, non-binary, pan-gender, poly-gender, third gender, gender-queer and neutrois.

Concerning the Equality Act, it wrongly said that “failure to deal with a transsexual woman in the same manner as other women would be direct discrimination”. It directed civil servants with HR responsibilities that when staff declare themselves to be trans they should be able to use toilets and changing rooms “appropriate to their new gender role”. It suggested that this is a legal right attached to the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, saying: “it would be humiliating, inappropriate and undermining to expect a person in their acquired gender to use toilet facilities of their birth sex or indeed be restricted to the use of the accessible toilet.” 

It advised that “any continued objection or inappropriate comments” by work colleagues “should be seen as unreasonable (discriminatory) and should be met with communication, discussion and education before the situation gets out of hand. In this sometimes contentious area, transsexual employees are entitled to expect support from management”.

Similarly, the GEO guidance on recruiting and retaining staff published in 2015 said:

“A trans person should be free to select the facilities appropriate to the gender in which they present. For example, when a trans person starts to live in their acquired gender role on a full time basis they should be afforded the right to use the facilities appropriate to the acquired gender role.”

Sue Owen, who endorsed the a:gender document, also championed government departments signing up to the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme and competing for a place on its index. She said in 2016: 

“Our aim is, of course, for all government organisations to improve the score they are awarded by Stonewall every year.”

She was at the time, and remained until 2022, on the board of trustees of the Center for Global Development, the think-tank that discriminated against Maya Forstater and argued in court that gender-critical beliefs were “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

In March 2019 the a:gender document was removed from the gov.uk website. In its place departments were told to take responsibility for developing their own policies, and to base their policies on a model provided by the Cabinet Office “working closely with a:gender and others”, and which would be circulated to departmental HR managers.

Meanwhile DCMS and other departments continued to pay thousands of pounds a year to be a member of the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme. DCMS refused to release details of its application to the Workplace Equality Index scheme, saying that to do so would not be in the public interest and would “likely impact Stonewall’s confidence in the process of future discussions, and in addition, damage their commercial interests”. 

DCMS did eventually respond to a freedom-of-information request in 2022 with a copy of the model policy. Compared with the 2016 document, it had been toned down. But it still suggests that individuals who declare themselves to be transgender have the right to use opposite-sex facilities, and that colleagues who don’t accept gender identity should be disciplined. 

The policy promotes gender ideology, saying that:

• Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender.
• To provide an inclusive and supportive workplace, the department must respect and support the gender identities and expressions of all its employees, regardless of how they identify.
• Refusing to accept a transgender person in their affirmed gender, by persistently referring to a trans woman as “he” or “him”, is likely to be harassment.

The policy undermines provision of single-sex facilities, saying that: 

• All individuals have the right to express their identity at work and present in their gender. This could mean… using any appropriate single-sex toilets and other facilities.
• It is assumed that the individual knows which facilities are the best match for their gender identity and expression.
• Some transgender, non-binary and intersex individuals may feel most comfortable using gender-neutral facilities where present, but this is a matter of personal choice.

The policy creates a hostile environment for those with gender-critical beliefs, saying that:

• “Transphobia” is the specific fear or dislike of someone because they are transgender – this includes refusing to accept an individual’s gender identity (this is not just limited to colleagues but could include public figures, criminals, or family members, or to groups in the abstract).
• Deadnaming, misgendering and “outing” (referring to someone’s actual sex) are transphobic behaviours.
• Deliberate, continued and repeated incidents of misgendering are unacceptable and should be dealt with using the bullying, harassment and discrimination policy.
• The gender identities of individuals must be respected at all times, and it remains unacceptable to use former names and/or incorrect pronouns while the individual concerned is not present.

These were the sorts of concerns that were raised internally by Frances. 

By July 2023 a new version of the model policy was in development and had been sent out for consultation within the civil service. It was also leaked to Vice. In some respects it was an improvement, saying that “employees can hold different opinions and beliefs in the workplace… as long as they engage in reasoned and rational debate”. But in other respects it was still seriously flawed, and pushed more responsibility down to individual departments, rather than offering a clear, standardised approach. 

It retreated from gender self-identification but asserted that a trans person with a gender-recognition certificate (GRC) is entitled to use facilities provided for members of their “acquired gender”. For individuals without a GRC it said departments would need to develop their own policies taking into account the Workplace Health and Safety Regulations. It suggested that trans employees could use facilities provided for members of the opposite sex if these were fully enclosed single-occupancy washrooms, but not shared facilities containing cubicles and washbasins. 

An unnamed civil servant quoted by Ben Hunte in Vice called the new draft guidance “terrifying”. Stonewall also condemned it, with Robbie de Santos, its director of external affairs at the time, describing it as “highly exclusionary and reprehensible” and claiming that it “would be unlikely to stand up to legal challenge, as it brazenly ignores the long-established rules around single-sex spaces as outlined in the UK’s world-class Equality Act”. Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, said it was “illegal and… revolting in equal measure”.

The approval process for the policy stalled and was never completed. 

On 8th April 2024 the GEO withdrew its 2015 guidance for service providers and on recruiting and retaining staff saying they were “now out of date”. They were not out of date. They were legally wrong and had been since they were written. 

In May 2024 the then Minister for Women and Equalities launched a call for input asking for examples of policy or guidance in which public bodies or organisations that advise public and private organisations “wrongly suggest that people have a legal right to access single-sex spaces and services according to their self-identified gender”.

The Office for Equal Opportunity (OEO; the successor to the GEO) has recently said that it received 404 examples of policies and guidance. It is not known how many were from central government departments. It said:

“In some cases, guidance reflected the organisation’s own policy to allow those with the ‘gender reassignment’ protected characteristic access to single-sex spaces that correspond with their self-identified gender, but did not incorrectly suggest that this is mandated by the Act. Had organisations suggested that their policy was mandated by the Act, however, this would have been a clear misinterpretation of the law….

“…the results of this call for input suggest that there is further work to do to ensure everyone has clarity about these exceptions in a range of different contexts.”

Given that Whitehall and the GEO (now OEO) have been driving this misinterpretation of the law for the past ten years, it is hard to have any confidence that they now intend to admit their mistake and sort it out.

This leaves the civil service open to more six-figure payouts.

What next? 

The statement agreed by the Permanent Secretaries of DCMS and DSIT says they are committed to upholding their duty of impartiality “in line with the recently issued non-partisan Guidance on Diversity and Inclusion and Impartiality for Civil Servants”. Among other things, this guidance says:

• Civil servants must always be guided by the core values of objectivity and impartiality when carrying out work in diversity and inclusion.
• The civil service value of “unity” means cohesion, mutual tolerance, and respect for the validity of other’s beliefs. It does not mean homogeneity or conformity of belief or views, and there is not an expectation to think as one. 
• It is appropriate to use sex-specific language where such language communicates the desired policy outcome. “This may include, for example, references to the needs of men and women respectively, or areas of policy where biological sex is a relevant or pertinent concept.”

The two department heads say they are working together to develop a new gender-reassignment policy that will comply with the Equality Act 2010 and will “balance rights” in relation to the protected characteristics of sex, religion and belief, and gender reassignment. The statement (dated December 2024) said that they expected the long-awaited central model policy to be out before the end of that year (there is still no sign of it).

It is time for clarity. The Cabinet Office and Sir Chris Wormald, as head of the civil service, need to throw out misleading advice received from a:gender and Stonewall and develop a single, simple, clear central policy that will protect all staff from unlawful discrimination and harassment.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is also seeking to finalise a new statutory code of practice for service providers that steps back from its previous approach, which wrongly suggested people who identify as transgender have a right to use opposite-sex facilities. 

Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 require that toilets and washing facilities are provided in “separate rooms… for men and women” unless they are fully enclosed unisex rooms. This is a simple requirement and not the start of a negotiation. Man and woman are not self-declared categories. 

Allowing male staff into facilities that are signposted for females is likely to result in unlawful harassment and discrimination against women, as the case Earl Shilton Town Council v Ms K Miller: [2023] EAT 5 found.

Building Code T was officially adopted in 2024 under the Building Regulations 2010. It states:

“Single-sex toilet means toilet facilities intended for the exclusive use of persons of the same sex, and with washbasins and hand-drying facilities in either the toilet room or cubicle, or in a separate area intended for use only by persons of that sex.”

and

“All toilet accommodation should have clear and appropriate signage.”

To avoid creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for female staff (in breach of Section 26 of the Equality Act), employers in the civil service and elsewhere need to say a firm, clear No to male employees who want to trespass on spaces provided for the privacy and dignity of their female colleagues, and vice versa for female employees who want to intrude on male-only spaces.

The new policy across the civil service must be clear that sex-based rules hold whatever staff are wearing, whatever pronouns they prefer to be called by, whatever they believe, whatever medication they take and however long they may have been allowed to break sex-based rules previously. It must not bend under pressure to chase awards from organisations like Stonewall, or in response to emotional blackmail about suicide or smears of “transphobia”.

The post Civil service must return to impartiality and protection for all appeared first on Sex Matters.

The problem with the proposal to ban conversion therapy

Acts of abuse and violence done in the name of conversion such as electrocution, sexual assault, rape and forced medication are already against the law. The government’s proposals are not supported by any evidence of a problem requiring a new criminal law.

Sexual orientation and “being transgender” (which is not defined) are not equivalent and conversion therapy is not defined. Without clear definitions and evidence we fear that, even with the best of intentions, this legislation will have negative unintended consequences: in particular, pressure to socially transition children, leading to greater pressure for irreversible medical treatment.

The fastest-growing and most brutal form of conversion that is being undertaken today is that involving a growing cohort of children who have been encouraged to believe they were “born in the wrong body” and need their bodies fixed with hormones and surgery. Making them believe that they can literally change sex (and sexual orientation) may lead them to undergo attempts at physical conversion that will impair their sexual function, ability to form relationships and fertility. The Coventry University research ignores all of the literature supporting the case for caution.

Along with the EHRC we argue that there is a need for more evidence, and we call on the government to wait for the recommendations of the Cass Review’s final report before enacting any legislation affecting the treatment of children and young people with gender dysphoria. We also support the EHRC’s call for pre-legislative scrutiny.

The recent disproportionate responses to the EHRC’s consultation response should give cause for concern. These overblown responses demonstrate how a vaguely defined new law to criminalise “conversion therapy” or “practice” would be weaponised to close down debate and in turn to criminalise those who disagree with the organisations that have lobbied for it.

Here is Sex Matters’ full response:

The post Responses to the government consultation on banning conversion therapy appeared first on Sex Matters.

“This Government has no intention to stop parents, clinicians, teachers, or anyone else from having open and explorative conversations with young people or others about their sexual orientation or whether they are transgender or not. As Minister for Equalities, I will not allow these kinds of supportive conversations to be outlawed. It is in no one’s interest.”

But the bad news is that the government does not seem to understand the risks of getting it wrong.

Following an article by Sex Matters’ Maya Forstater in The Critic, the Government Equalities Office (GEO) wrote to the magazine asking for seven myths to be dispelled.

But in fact the government’s talking points contain several myths. Perhaps most shockingly, they say: 

“This policy is not rushed. It was first announced in 2018 and has been debated on multiple occasions in parliament.”

In fact a review of Hansard records show that the policy has never been properly debated in parliament, and when it was announced in the Queen’s Speech, everyone in parliament seemed to think it was about “gay conversion therapy”.

Freer says that “evidence suggests that transgender people are currently experiencing, or are targeted with, these abhorrent practices, experiencing significant negative impacts as a result”.

But the government’s own research study was unable to clearly characterise conversion therapy in relation to gender identity, found no evidence of it in the UK, and found no evidence to support its claim of harm. 

We are calling for pre-legislative scrutiny (a process where a committee of peers and MPs consider an early draft fo the legislation) to make sure the government gets this legislation right – and does not add fuel to the fire of social-contagion-driven youth dysphoria, and the medical “conversion” of gay and gender-non-conforming children. 

For a detailed analysis, read Maya Forstater’s new article in The Critic, ‘Fact not Fiction’.

The post Myths and truths on conversion therapy appeared first on Sex Matters.

This is a consultation which is particularly relevant to people with learning difficulties. There is concern that increasing numbers of children with autism and communication difficulties are being self-diagnosed as transsexual: encouraged to think that their problems stem from “being born in the wrong body” and that they must be “affirmed” as the opposite sex. It emerged last year that 35% of children referred to the Tavistock GIDS clinic had autistic traits. 

Sex Matters has written to Minister Mike Freer about the failure to produce the promised easy reading version, as well as to Baroness Kishwer Falkner, at the Equality and Human Rights Commission. 

Last week the government finally published “version 5” of the easy reading document and then quickly unpublished it. Fortunately Sex Matters saved a copy.

As reported in The Telegraph and The Mail, the easy reading version suggests the ban would target teachers for prosecution if they do not agree that a child with learning difficulties is “the gender they want to be”. 

The easy reading version of the consultation also tells lesbians with learning difficulties that sexual orientation relates to gender not sex, and people must be accepted as the “gender they want to be”. 

The decision to seemingly abandon the attempt to provide an “easy reading” version of this rushed and ill-judged consultation is telling. Once the proposals are spelled out in plain language, it becomes all too easy to see what a bad idea they are.

A teacher explaining how gender identity is different from sex, and that “wanting to change your gender” is not the same as being the opposite sex might be accused of “conversion therapy”. 

If a school says that a child is not allowed to use opposite-sex toilets or changing rooms or that a male child cannot compete in girls’ sports, or refuses to change a child’s pronouns and keep their sex secret, they are likely to face accusations of undertaking “conversion therapy” by not affirming their gender.

The consultation suggests that schools and other authorities should not “pressure” people to follow rules that relate to their sex, as this would be viewed as “control”.

The easy reading guide shows how poorly thought out this legislation is. It aims to protect people with learning difficulties but it puts them at greater risk of exploitation. 

The Government Equality Office has now wiped the easy read consultation document from the website, although it told us last week that it was still planning to produce one. 

We are calling on the government to extend the consultation and produce the promised easy reading guide. 

The post Where is the easy reading version of the conversion therapy consultation? appeared first on Sex Matters.

Jayne Ozanne, the chief promoter of this proposed legislation, called this “offensive and triggering”. She told Pink News the talk was “very insensitive” and “transphobic” and a “vicious attack” on the trans community. 

But as Kate Harris of LGB Alliance said at the same event, policy-making must be based on facts, not feelings.

The fact are that the government’s own research did not define conversion therapy clearly,  and the research review found no evidence of harm in relation to gender identity.

If you haven’t already emailed your MP, do it now:

Just how bad is the government’s evidence?

A couple of weeks ago we published a rapid review of the Coventry University research commissioned by the Government Equality Office (GEO) in support of its proposal to criminalise “conversion therapy”. We found that review extremely thin, with overheated conclusions.

There are two documents, and as we said at the time they are confusingly named.

One report looks like this:

It states that it was commissioned by GEO, with the research carried out by a Coventry University team lead by Dr Jowett.

The second report looks like this: 

This one says it supplements the first report carried out by Coventry University. It is not immediately clear whom it is by.

Both reports are based on the same 46 studies and use the same “Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool” (the first report also includes highlights from 30 interviews).

Basically, the second report is a summary of the same literature review as in the first report, presented slightly differently. We misread this as being an input study to the larger report – in fact this was wrong. 

The second report is by GEO. It is referred to in the government’s consultation document like this:

The government conducted a further assessment of the international evidence, to supplement the study by Jowett and others (2021), to look in more detail at the distinction between evidence on conversion therapy to change sexual orientation, and that to change gender identity (Government Equalities Office, 2021b).

Perhaps the government was unconvinced by the Jowett study, and so asked the civil servants at GEO to do a further assessment? But the “further assessment” is in fact a reproduction of the same evidence as the Jowett study.

So some of the “sexing up” of the findings which we highlighted in our review of the Coventry study was not in fact the responsibility of the university team, but of GEO. 

In its report GEO summarises the findings in relation to gender identity as showing that:

“conversion therapies were associated with self-reported harms (such as mental health conditions like depression and feeling suicidal).”

The Coventry university team says: 

“There is limited but reasonably strong evidence that self-reported harm is associated with conversion therapy.”

Both of these statements are misleading and do not reflect the underlying evidence.

It appears that GEO officials, under pressure to deliver an outcome for the jamboree event in June 2021, have presented the findings of the research to meet the expectations of activists such as Ms Ozanne and Stonewall, who describe an honest look at the evidence, and a cautious approach to legislation that may promote child transition, as “transphobic”.

In fact there is no evidence of harm 

The word harm communicates a causal relationship. According to the Collins English Dictionary, it means “the damage to something which is caused by a particular course of action”.

Remember, the only evidence in the Coventry University team found that relates negative mental health with experience of “conversion” in relation to gender identity comes from the statistical analysis carried out by a team led by Dr Jack Turban. The title of the Turban study is “Association Between Recalled Exposure to Gender Identity Conversion Efforts and Psychological Distress and Suicide Attempts Among Transgender Adults”. The word harm does not appear in the paper. 

Turban found, within a self-selected survey in the US, a statistical association between subjects recalling any professional (such as a psychologist, counsellor or religious adviser) had tried to “stop you being trans” and severe mental distress predictive of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or other serious mental disorders. 

But association is not evidence of the causal relationship of harm.

As the Coventry University study itself states:

“There is also a need to be careful when making causal interpretations from such studies. For example, an alternative explanation could be that LGBT people with mental health problems are more likely to seek out conversion therapy.”

More specifically than this, as Roberto D’Angelo et al wrote in their critique of the Turban study, patients with poor underlying mental health may be less likely to be affirmed as transgender, and may experience this as invalidating and describe it by answering yes to the question interpreted as “conversion therapy”. 

As they explain from experience, patients with psychiatric diagnoses can often misinterpret neutral interpersonal interactions as invalidating or rejecting, and it is common where a therapist identifies a patient’s dysphoria as secondary to another condition for the patient to experience this as withholding treatment they desperately want and to respond negatively. 

There is no comparable parallel to this with being gay, lesbian or bisexual, since being homosexual is not a medical condition for which there is a diagnosis or treatment that doctors might withhold. 

Calling this “self-reported harm” is putting the word into the mouths of the research subjects, who in fact reported poor mental health, not harm from conversion efforts.

D’Angelo et al say that any claim of causation implies that exposure to perceived effort to stop someone being trans causes previously mentally well people to develop serious mental illness. They say this is “a highly speculative and implausible hypothesis”, and argue that:

“Presenting a highly confounded association as causation is a serious error, given its potential to dangerously misinform and mislead clinicians, policymakers, and the public at large about this important issue.”

Labour’s statistic

Meanwhile Labour MPs responding to Sex Matters supporters writing to them expressing concerns and asking to extend the consultation have responded with this statistic

“[the] 2020 ‘Conversion Therapy’ and Gender Identity Survey found that over 92% of people who had experienced attempts to change their gender identity had suffered from mental health issues.”

This factoid comes from a self-selected survey carried out by Stonewall, the Ozanne Foundation, GIRES, Mermaids and the LGBT Foundation. They found 38 “gender diverse” people who said they had experienced gender identity conversion therapy. Of these 92% also said they experienced anxiety and depression. Of the 409 gender diverse people who answered the survey saying they hadn’t experienced gender identity conversion therapy 79% experienced anxiety and depression.

This is a poor quality study and no conclusion can be drawn from from the 92% figure.

The post Conversion therapy: calling for legislation without evidence appeared first on Sex Matters.

They proposed to create a new criminal offence that will allow therapists who question the gender self-identity of children or vulnerable people (including those with other psychiatric diagnoses) to be fined or imprisoned.

While they say it will not interfere with healthcare staff “providing legitimate support for those who may be questioning if they are LGBT”, if children or other vulnerable people say that they are not questioning whether they are transgender, then any therapist that fails to affirm their gender self-identity could be prosecuted.

The Government Equalities Office (GEO) commissioned a research team from Coventry University to undertake a study of evidence on “conversion therapy”. It was completed in June, but only published last week.

Sex Matters has published a rapid assessment of the Coventry University research.

The Coventry report set out to show that “gender identity conversion therapy” is similar to religiously motivated or pseudoscientific attempts to “pray the gay away”.

But it could find no evidence. We were shocked by the weak evidence that the report relies on.

Three datasets

After an exhaustive survey of the academic literature, all the Coventry University team could find was a question in a self-selected survey carried out by a US transgender advocacy organisation, an academic study which involved an online survey who watched a video clip, and a survey of academic literature which found papers covering 10 individual cases. The Coventry University team also interviewed four individual trans people and two who identified as non-binary.

One of the studies included in that survey of academic literature was by the leading psychologist specialising in gender dysphoria, Professor Ken Zucker, involving seven children under ten given open-ended play psychotherapy. The result was that a majority desisted in their cross-sex identities. This is what is viewed as “conversion therapy” in this study.

No evidence on gender identity “conversion”

The Coventry University report says:

“There is increasing evidence that attempts to change a person’s […] gender identity can cause serious harm”.

The core piece of evidence that the study relies on is a US online survey, developed into an academic paper “Association Between Recalled Exposure to Gender Identity Conversion Efforts and Psychological Distress and Suicide Attempts Among Transgender Adults” by a team lead by Dr Jack Turban.

While the Coventry research team assess this study to be of “above average quality” it has already attracted severe criticism published in an academic journal. Roberto D’Angelo et al wrote a critique of it “One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria” in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

They argue that it is compromised by serious methodological flaws, including the use of a biased data sample, reliance on survey questions with poor validity, and the omission of a key control variable, namely subjects’ baseline mental health status. They say:

“While they claim to have found evidence that [Gender Identity Change Effort] is associated with
psychological distress, what they actually found was that those recalling GICE were more likely to be suffering from serious mental illness… an alternative explanation for the found association – that individuals with poor underlying mental health were less likely to be affirmed by their therapist as transgender – is just as likely, based on the data presented.”

An ideologically driven research study

The Coventry University study does not clearly define or describe “conversion therapy” in relation to gender identity. The approach is mainly to apply conclusions from the evidence related to conversion efforts on sexual orientation.

The broader context for this is the political call for same sex-attracted (LGB) people to stand in solidarity with people who identify as transgender, as expressed in slogans such as “No LGB without the T” and “L with the T”. Such solidarity between groups is legitimate as a political axis for organising. But it is not a defensible approach to analyse evidence about people with different characteristics, experiencing different phenomena.

Dr Adam Jowett, leader of the Coventry University Study, clearly takes a strongly ideological position, going as far as to put words into the mouths of the people interviewed for the government commissioned research, saying that he is sure they would agree with his viewpoint on the LGB Alliance.

Ignoring harm and other conditions

While the Coventry University study references Teen Vogue, Stonewall and the Ozanne Foundation, it does not draw on any analysis that is critical of the affirmation-only approach it promotes. It says nothing about desistance and detransition and the concerns around the unprecedented rise in young people experiencing gender dysphoria and seeking to transition. Our rapid review contains an appendix of over a dozen published articles it could have considered.

Nor does it mention the Cass Review, which is ongoing and is considering how best gender identity services for children and young people should be delivered.

While there is a very little evidence at all in the report on what it calls “gender identity conversion therapy”, the researchers make one shocking statement which says more about the researchers than their subjects.

“Two said psychiatrists treated their gender identities as if they were a symptom of their mental health condition (schizophrenia, PTSD).”

They call this “evidence that some mental health professionals might mistake minority […] gender identities as symptoms of existing mental health conditions ”

Of course the researchers carrying out one-hour interviews were in no position to determine whether psychiatrists treating people with complex mental health conditions are mistaken or not.

Sex Matters says: wait for the Cass Review

Based on our rapid review of the Coventry Studies we conclude:

1. The studies present no robust evidence that supports the call for banning or criminalising ‘conversion therapy’ in relation to transgender identity. The concept and practice remains underspecified and ill-defined and there is no
   evidence of harm.
2. Writing the simplistic ‘affirmation’ versus ‘conversion’ binary into criminal and civil law risks doing harm to children and parents, to therapists and other professionals, and to the relationship between them, without any evidence of the harm it purports to be addressing.
3. Rushing through any legislation concerning the treatment of children presenting with gender dysphoria before the outcome of the Cass Review is released would be irresponsible and counterproductive to evidence-based
   policy making.

The post GEO research finds no evidence for banning transgender “conversion therapy” appeared first on Sex Matters.